Logos, Pathos et Ethos in 21st century Silicon Valley

October 13, 2015

I hope that after this measure fail to pass—because it has absolutely no support from anyone who cares about public education—the Los Altos City Council will genuinely work together with LASD on securing an additional school site (or two) for our community.

October 04, 2015

There are a lot of reasons to vote no, but the primary one is that the plan makes no accommodation for the new school that needs to be built in our school district. The city council has thus far shown only the weakest of lip service to helping LASD. Rejecting their inadequate plan will send a strong message to them that their next proposal must help our schools in addition to the rest of the community.

April 29, 2015

Last year I finally got fed up with my bulky bi-fold wallet: the same design I'd been using my entire adult life. I read this article about all the wallets on KickStarter and used it as a the basis for some extensive research into different wallets.

I narrowed it down to a few that I thought were most promising and ordered them all. After trying them out, I settled on the Crabby Gear as my wallet of choice. It's inexpensive, very thin and light, and has reasonably good access to the contents. One minor downside is that in order to fit cash in it, I had to learn how to fold bills into thirds.

January 23, 2015

As a citizen candidate myself, I am pleased to see others step up and do the same. I supported Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu campaign for NY governor &amp lieutenant governor respectively. They garnered 35% of the vote while spending 2.5% of the incumbent, which are about the same numbers from my bid for county school board. More importantly, they changed the nature of the discussion.

The strong showing by Teachout and Wu was a victory for progressive voters who warmed to their message about tackling rising inequality, political corruption, and corporate abuses. It was also a rejection of Cuomo’s economic philosophy, which led him to introduce a series of tax cuts for the rich, at the same time that he cut the state budgets for education and social services...

Teachout and Wu’s insurgent campaigns gave voice to this sentiment. Eschewing the etiquette of internal party discourse, Teachout accused Cuomo of governing as a Republican, acting as a shill for the big banks and other campaign contributors, and being part of a “corrupt old boys’ club” in Albany. Making full use of social media and appearances in more traditional media, she demonstrated that, even in this day and age, a candidate with a real message doesn’t necessarily need the support of the party apparatus, or the financial backing of big donors, to have an impact.

“It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.” – Douglas Adams

We have a theory that we’re about to see a huge change in how elections and politics work. Across the country, we have seen regular citizens stepping up and challenging the status quo built by political parties and career politicians. They have been getting closer and closer to victory and, here in Kentucky, we believe we have a chance to win and break the political party stronghold for good.

We are not politicians. We are Citizen Candidates.

Citizen Candidates evaluate ideas on merit, not on outside influence, campaign contribution sources, or party ideology. They believe a good idea is a good idea, no matter which political party supports it. Citizen Candidates are regular people with common sense. They are capable leaders who would be fantastic elected officials - if they chose to run. Most don’t. And we can’t blame them.

Even if he doesn't win, his mere presence will undeniably change the conversation. Those he is challenging will have to respond to his thoughts and ideas. In the end, we all win for that. I wish him the best.

January 22, 2015

I recently watched Downloaded, a documentary movie about the revolutionary music sharing service Napster. I found it to be very interesting, as it shows how the recording companies at the time still thought they were in the "selling music" business, and were desperately trying to jam the genie back into the bottle.

Yet here we are 15 years later, and you can pretty much stream any recent song by any artist for free on sites like YouTube, SoundCloud, and BandCamp. Disruptive innovation happens no matter how big of a tantrum the entrenched companies throw. The only thing they can do is delay the inevitable, and make themselves look foolish all the while.

It brought back memories of me using the service. Once I got over the novelty of it all, I started using search terms "acoustic" or "unplugged" or "cover" to find alternate versions of songs I already loved. And I remember stumbling upon this gem by Sting, who did an acoustic cover of one of my top ten songs of all time, Why Should I Cry For You?

The version I downloaded was a poorly-encoded 128 kbps. I looked everywhere for the CD that contained this song for a higher-fidelity version, but apparently you could only get it by buying the DVD or VHS video. So here's a case where I wanted to give the music industry money for a product that they apparently didn't think was worth making. Even to this day; I just did a search on Amazon and came up short. But Napster exposed me to it, and reignited my interest in Sting (his newer work just doesn't stand up, sadly).

Another story: I had bought Matchbox 20's first album, and loved it. I downloaded their second one—Mad Season—from Napster to check it out. My dad had just found out about Napster (he was a late adopter) and was going crazy finding obscure a capella music that was really hard to come by otherwise. He asked what I had listened to recently that I really liked, so I told him about Mad Season.

A few days later I got a package in the mail from him. It contained a CD of Mad Season with a note that said "If you like it so much, then we should support them so they keep making more great music."

January 14, 2015

As an ex-Yahoo!, it's sad to see the market value them so low. Yahoo has stakes in both Alibaba (16.3%) and Yahoo Japan (35%). Taking these out of the market cap, the market currently values Yahoo's core business at $833 million today. And if you look at the chart for the last 3 months, you can see that for much of the time, the core was valued at less than $0. In the first half of Nov, it was valued between negative $2—$6 billion! If I had been paying attention, I would have bought stock then; Seems like an obvious arbitrage opportunity.

January 09, 2015

Some ignorant, short-sighted, and altogether evil people killed eight journalists and satirists in France because they didn't like what they had to say. So the proper response is for the world to show everyone that actions like these will not suppress language they find subjectively offensive. Further, it will cause the message to be broadcast further, wider, and louder than it would have previously. See also Everybody draw Mohammed Day.

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

I recently received a threat letter from Icondia regarding my fair use of these photos in my 2011 post. It's the same letter that TechDirt also received, who quite adeptly responded to in this recent post. I like TechDirt's response so much—in fact—I am adopting it as my official response to the letter. However I am adding two small postscripts:

November 05, 2014

I am overall happy with the results of the election from last night. Sure, I'm disappointed by Measure N unofficially losing by the swing of 9 votes (there will no doubt be a recount with such a slim margin). But this election proved again—as was shown in 2012 by the Amanda Burke-Aaronson and David Neighbors campaigns—that money cannot buy an informed electorate.

I am proud to be a part of this democratic process. As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Church, Winston.

November 04, 2014

I admit I know a lot less about the high school governing board than I do about K-8. However those I trust recommend Torok and Walter. For the third, I decided to go with Mitchner from the MV Voice endorsement, since they were aligned with me on the other two.